The proliferation of video sharing through video hosting services provides numerous opportunities to collaborate and experience videos in online communities. Video hosting services allow users to upload, view, comment on and rate videos. Users browsing a video hosting service can locate videos of interest by, for example, searching for videos, browsing directories, or sorting by ratings.
Most video hosting services provide a comment field interface by which users can provide comments about a video. Typically, a comment field is associated with the entire video, rather than any specific portion. If a user wants to direct others to a specific portion of the video, the user has to manually enter some text indicating the time offset associated with their comments. For example, the user would enter a comment such as “See the video at 01:48”, which tells other users to view the video at 1 minute and 48 seconds. To see what content of the video the user is referring to in this example, other users have to manually control the video player to seek to the suggested 1 minute, 48 second time offset to view the video from there and understand the comment. In most video hosting service, attempting to seek to a specific time offset requires the user to wait for the entire video to load into the user's video player. The time required for the video to load can be relatively long depending on a number of factors, such as the size of the video file, speed of the user's internet connection, or the speed of the user's computer. Thus, some users might choose forgo viewing the suggested video content in order to avoid waiting for the entire video to load.
This problem is further complicated because the user must also remember the suggested time offset while waiting for the video to load. Thus, some users who want to view the suggested video segment will be unable to do because they will not remember the suggested time offset.